Cities Skylines 2: Improves Traffic Simulation with Addition of Car Crashes
Cities: Skylines often felt akin to a traffic management simulation, with countless hours devoted to tinkering with road networks to manage congestions. Now, Cities: Skylines 2 appears poised to go even further, offering deeper immersion, as highlighted in two recently released videos focusing on road and traffic AI upgrades.
Among the exciting new features are car crashes, significantly improved pathfinding, and car parks.
City dwellers in Cities: Skylines didn’t always utilize the efficient road networks designed for them, choosing rather unpredictable routes. However, Cities: Skylines 2 introduces a traffic pathfinding overhaul, making it far more reasoned.
In the original Cities: Skylines, pathfinding was proximity-based, leading agents to choose destinations based on straight-line distance, often ignoring the constructed road structures,” disclosed a developer diary on the feature. This decision-making process could complicate situations – for instance, a fire truck might respond from the nearest station even though the road connectivity meant a longer route.
In contrast, Cities: Skylines 2, “pathfinding costs” guide route selection using a variety of factors like the city’s road network, travel time, costs, and agent preferences, among others.”
This upgrade means drivers will prioritize faster, multi-lane roads over slow, congested routes, and have the ability to navigate in real-time, particularly useful when paths are blocked by accidents.
Road accidents, a fresh feature, are influenced by myriad elements, including road quality. Maintaining your road network requires the establishment of road maintenance crews, but other contributing factors include “lighting conditions, weather, and disasters”. When an accident happens, a randomly selected vehicle “loses control” and can potentially collide with other vehicles or buildings, which will then spark an emergency response.
Another exciting inclusion in Cities: Skylines 2 is the introduction of structured parking lots. Availability and cost of parking will now influence drivers’ travel decisions within the city.
Coupling these enhancements are performance upgrades over the original Cities: Skylines. There are no “hard limits for agents moving about in the city” in Cities: Skylines 2. The only real limitation to the simulation are hardware restrictions of the platform running the game.”
